


Glowfic Ficlets

by wildwestwind



Series: Ficlets [1]
Category: Eternal Lies, Glowfic and Related Works, The Northern Caves
Genre: Alien Gender/Sexuality, Alternate Universe - 1910s, Alternate Universe - BDSM, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Angst, F/F, Gen, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Pining, Sex Work, Sexism, Xenophilia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:53:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 7
Words: 1,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25190443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wildwestwind/pseuds/wildwestwind
Summary: Assorted ficlets, mostly of my glowfic characters.#1: Explicit. Eli (a Lev) and Bruce in Gallia, in an AU where Gallians have weird genitalia. ~200 words.#2: Gen. Lev is forced to volunteer for his college application and has an angry crush on Asher. ~300 words.#3: Gen. Leonard Salby/William Chen, The Northern Caves. 27 words.#4: Gen. Lev and Sasha are both spiderpeople in Spiderverse and they're both in danger of disintegrating. 46 words.#5: Explicit. Leah (a Lev) is not a very good camgirl. ~100 words.#6: Explicit. 1910s New York immigrant Marlo and Lev. (Technically Eternal Lies, but nothing supernatural happens and it makes perfect sense as a standalone.) ~700 words.#7: Gen. Inaaya and Joan have a cultural disagreement. ~100 words
Relationships: Leonard Salby/William Chen, Lev Aarons/Asher Kane, Lev Aarons/Bruce, Lev Aarons/Sasha Michaels
Series: Ficlets [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1824811
Kudos: 6





	1. Chapter 1

“So it enlarges when you’re aroused?” Eli asks.

Bruce puts a hand on his forehead. “Yes.”

Eli pokes Bruce’s dick with obvious fascination. It bounces a little bit. “And then when you orgasm it shoots liquid which carries your gametes?”

“Sperm,” Bruce says, “the gametes are called sperm.” He is torn between profound embarrassment and the fact that he doesn’t want to interrupt biological inquiry with something as comparatively minor as horniness.

“It has a very interesting texture,” Eli says, touching Bruce’s dick with an attitude of scientific curiosity. “Sort of spongey.”

The feather-light touches should not be as torturous as they are. Bruce makes a noise.

“You know,” Eli says, “I bet normal people would find this very sexy.”

If Bruce were more capable of speech he would object to the implication that Eli does not find it sexy. 

“You can’t lie, can you,” Eli says. “No matter how badly you want to hide that you’re aroused, your genitalia going to tell the truth. No matter how frightened or embarrassed you are or how badly you want to deny it… Did you say men were the submissive sex in your world?” He sits back on his heels and looks at Bruce expectantly.

Bruce eventually manages to form words. “No,” Bruce says, “women used to be. But we’re supposed to all be equal.”

“Hm,” Eli says. “You are weird aliens.”


	2. Chapter 2

When Lev’s parents send him to volunteer at the Habitat for Humanity, he thinks it is going to be enraging because he has to do boring manual labor in order to appear altruistic so he can get into college. (He ponders asking his parents whether doing altruism so you can get into college is actually in any meaningful sense altruism, but decides this is one of those questions better left unasked.)

Instead, it is enraging because of the shift leader. Asher is twenty-five years old and just out of the military, which is enraging, because of Lev’s firm commitment to pacifism that is not at all caused by his terror of loud noises and death. He has the body of a Greek god and keeps taking his shirt off mid-shift, which fills Lev with this combination of rage, jealousy, and lust. He’s effortlessly charming; everyone wants to see his grin. When he enters the room everyone turns to him like flowers seeking the sun. 

Lev has a crush on him, of course. Everyone has a crush on him, it’s fucking cliche, and it would make Lev want to hammer his own thumb, except he’s already done that a dozen times and knows exactly how painful it is. 

And then, if that were not bad enough, Lev saw him sitting on the rafters of the house he’s building (because of course he does that), pen in his mouth, reading a textbook entitled Principles of Chemical Science, by which means Lev discovers that Asher is wicked smart, is going to MIT in the fall, and is absolutely dying to talk to Lev about math. 

This is going to be a long goddamn summer.


	3. Chapter 3

It brings to mind, Salby thinks staring at Chen’s sleeping form, something that– as blasphemous as it is– he can only call a sense of definite rightness.


	4. Chapter 4

“Yours,” he says laughing when they’re swinging on webs together, and “yours” he says into Sasha’s mouth when they kiss, and “yours,” he says when Sasha hugs him after he glitches, and “always yours, forever yours” the last time he sees Sasha as he fades away.


	5. Chapter 5

In the past two hours, Leah has earned five dollars.

It was supposed to be easy. Anyone could do it. You just take off your clothes online for horny men, who were constantly desperate to look at naked women, that being why they kept messaging people asking for nudes. It’s like selling candy to two dozen three-year-olds none of whom have eaten in the past eight hours. The problem is beating them away with a stick.

She smiles at her room– can’t let them know you’re upset– and says something about how much she LOVES her Darth Vader dildo. 

Except apparently it’s not easy– not for Leah– and she doesn’t know how she’s going to buy food or pay rent and she spent money she didn’t have on this camera and her sex toys and. 

Apparently however desperate the horny men are for naked women they aren’t desperate enough to look at her.


	6. Chapter 6

Marlo has always done what real men are supposed to do. 

Real men earn money on the docks or on the ships or working construction, and then spend a few weeks drinking it up until they have to work again. Real men win at darts and at boxing and at baseball. Real men buy a round for every one of their friends at the saloon. Real men never back down from a fight. Real men are supposed to be jovial and funny and get along with everyone, but “quiet” works well enough for the purpose. Real men have sex, often, with dozens of bad girls and fairies; real men might someday get married to nice girls (Marlo imagines this vaguely, without his future wife exactly having any facial features). Real men have a very special and passionate devotion to Our Lady which does not ever extend to not being too hung over for church or refraining from committing sins. 

Marlo is _good_ at being a real man. And he can put his feelings about the subject into a little box and ignore them. Which is, if you think about it, the thing a real man would do with feelings. So it makes sense. 

Lev– tiny, quick-witted Lev, with his thick Yiddish accent and his love of books and the way he’s quiet until you can’t get him to shut up and his general air of wanting to fight everyone despite being small enough and enough of a fairy that he’d always lose– has been opening up a lot of Marlo’s boxes.

–

Lev can’t study at home, for reasons about which Lev won’t talk and Marlo won’t ask. So half of Marlo’s room at the boarding house is covered with dog-eared schoolbooks and scrap paper from his translations and math problems and endlessly practiced, flawlessly correct A’s.

 _This is Latin_ , Lev says, and Marlo learns about Julius Caesar and Cicero and the real men of thousands of years ago much like the real men of today; _this is Greek_ , and Marlo learns about sailors, the storms as terrifying as the Cyclops and the longing to come home; _this is trigonometry_ , and Marlo learns that you can measure the height of a building by measuring its shadow; _this is physics_ , and Marlo learns the world has rules that humans can understand, that the stars are other suns like their Sun so far away that they look like tiny dots in the night. 

There are jobs, for people who aren’t real men, where you can spend all day in an office and don’t have to lift anything heavier than a pencil and make more money than Marlo has ever seen in one place in his life. But to get one of those jobs you have to not only finish high school but go to college, and to go to college Lev has to unravel the mysteries of Latin and Greek and trigonometry and physics– and history and composition and geography and literature and… 

Marlo finds a berth on the ship ten days early and pays for the room at the boarding house until he gets back. 

–

When he’s on the ship, Marlo thinks about Archimedes’ principle which is how boats work and the suns that are so far away they look like dots in the sky and about Odysseus, who sailed for ten years and the only thing he wanted was to go home. 

–

At night Lev curls up in his arms and says, very quietly, “you’re not like them, you’re like me,” and it’s not a question.

Marlo feels a surge of self-hatred and revulsion and disgust before he looks down at Lev in his arms and it all goes away. He doesn’t answer the question, but his lack of protest is its own answer. 

“If you want to, you can,” Lev says.

It unlocks a box Marlo had very carefully hidden away in a corner of his mind, of getting on his knees for Lev, taking Lev into his mouth, making Lev feel good, hearing the way that Lev gasps and moans under him, doing things that are gross and disgusting and degrading for any real man to do but that would _make Lev happy_ , being good, making Lev _proud_ –

“I love you,” Marlo says, instead of an answer.

“I know.”


	7. Chapter 7

Inaaya is an adult. 

Her parents had started to look around for a husband for her, before she had other ideas. In a year she could have had children; in five years she could have been trapped for the rest of her life. Which is why she had tried to join the Emporium of Bangkok Antiquities in the first place. Inaaya did not much fancy being trapped. 

She understands that Joan’s culture has different norms of when you become an adult. She is willing to listen to her explain them. But at night Inaaya is going to teach Joan a lesson about the importance of cultural exchange.


End file.
